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CHANGING THE GUARD: THE 1960S
‘No organised crimes of violence were recorded in 1964 nor were any such crimes recorded in 1963.’
– REPORT OF THE GARDA COMMISSIONER ON CRIME 1964
In the first week of May 1964, the Commissioner of the Garda Síochána, Daniel J. Costigan, put the finishing touches on what would be his last Annual Report on crime in Ireland.
Secure in his office in Garda Headquarters, facing out across the expanse of the Phoenix Park, the fifth Commissioner since the foundation of the State should have been able to enjoy a sense of accomplishment in the 12th year of his tenure.
He could have had little reason to doubt that he and his successors would continue to operate in conditions of tranquillity in which a policeman’s lot was a fairly happy one. Objectively, he had much to feel positive about.
But within a few years, this apparent idyll would be gone forever. The force over which he now presided would face crises he probably could never have imagined. And the State which he and that force were committed to serve would undergo challenges that would be nothing less than existential.
Ireland in 1963 and 1964 was a country virtually free of serious crime. Costigan’s report recorded 16,203 indictable offences, about one sixth of the crime rate, proportionate to population, of England and Wales. The Garda’s detection rate was 69 per cent. In the most serious category, ‘Offences against the Person’, (1,047) the detection rate was an astonishing 95%. Beyond some burglaries, mainly around Dublin, there was no professional crime.1
In the year under review (ending September 30th 1963) there had been four murders in the State. Two resulted in ‘not guilty’ verdicts and one – the killing of 16-year-old Hazel Mullen by South African student Shan Mohangi – yielded a conviction for manslaughter. The fourth case, the strangling of 21-year-old Cecilia McEvoy, near Portlaoise, remained unsolved although a suspect died by misadventure while the investigation was in train.
There were other factors that should have given the Commissioner cause to feel satisfied. The Irish Republican Army’s (IRA) campaign of violence, started in 1956, codenamed ‘Operation Harvest’ and focusing on the Northern Ireland border, had officially ended in 1962. The IRA was a spent force, its leadership scattered and the great bulk of its weaponry seized by the security forces North and South.
The Border campaign had resulted in the deaths of 18 people. But there was no popular uprising among Nationalists in Northern Ireland, as IRA strategists had hoped. Opinion in the Republic was largely indifferent although there were local sympathies for IRA casualties.
The Garda Síochána had responded to the challenge posed by the campaign, under the stern direction of the coalition government led by Fine Gael’s John A. Costello. For most of the men in Costello’s Cabinet, the civil war was a living memory. There would be no tolerance for self-styled soldiers of the Republic.
The government invoked the Offences against the State Act in January 1957, introducing internment without trial. The Northern Ireland government did likewise under its Special Powers Act. It was an undeclared co-ordination.
Operations were directed from Garda headquarters by a strengthened ‘C3’ (crime) Branch, led by Chief Superintendent Patrick Carroll and Chief Superintendent John Gilroy. Carroll was a veteran of the security section in the 1940s when its energies had to be directed simultaneously against the IRA and Nazi intelligence agents, half a dozen of whom were sent to Ireland to link up with the IRA.2
In Dublin, the Special Detective Unit (SDU), led by Detective Superintendent Michael Gill, had built a sizeable bank of intelligence on the IRA. They had plenty of time to prepare. In September 1953 the London-based Empire News had claimed that a new IRA offensive was in preparation and that Superintendent Gill had a ‘high ranking spy’ in the IRA for ‘many years’.
Gill sued Empire News but the High Court did not entertain his allegation of libel. Arguably, it might have been a more substantive defamation had it suggested that the head of the Special Branch did not have a ‘high ranking spy’ in the IRA.
In the country, local Special Branch units, supported by uniformed gardaí, rounded up about 60 IRA men for detention in the Curragh Internment Camp. There were seizures of arms, ammunition and explosives in an operation that started on July 8th 1957. An estimated 400 gardaí were sent north to reinforce the Border divisions. New equipment, including short-wave radio for patrol cars, was hurriedly installed along a line from Donegal to Louth.3
When the Costello government fell, Fianna Fáil, still led by 72-year-old Éamon de Valera, returned to power. The new government was no less determined to suppress the IRA. In the autumn of 1961 the Minister for Justice, Charles Haughey, reintroduced the military courts which had operated in the period from 1939 to 1945. Peter Berry travelled to Belfast to coordinate security measures with Stormont officials.
But while the gardaí came down hard on the IRA, they limited the extent of their cooperation with the RUC. When a garda raiding party came across a list of IRA units within Northern Ireland with the names of key personnel, it was quickly brought to the Depot and buried in C3. There was no question of sharing it with Belfast, where its content would have been highly valued.4
On February 26th 1962 the IRA announced that the campaign was ended. Within months, the few IRA men remaining in detention were turned loose. The garda deployment along the Border was reversed. In places, the prized radio equipment was dismantled and brought to the Depot for storage.
Not many of those outside of the State law enforcement system appreciated the difficulties of the task faced by the Garda Síochána during the IRA campaign. There was little understanding of how unfit the force had been in some respects to discharge that task.
Costigan would have had a realistic sense of the situation. Like his predecessor, Michael Kinnane, who had started his working life as a Crown civil servant in London, he was not a career policeman. He had been a civil servant since leaving school, rising relatively quickly to the rank of Assistant Secretary at the Department of Justice. A native of Bantry, County Cork, he had been appointed as Commissioner, aged 41, in July 1952, while Gerald Boland was Minister for Justice. He was intelligent, open-minded and aware that his ageing force, largely recruited in the 1920s and 1930s, faced serious organisational challenges for the future.
Its operational capacities had been steadily run down since the end of World War II when both internal and external threats to the State receded.
Simultaneously, Army Intelligence (G2) had been scaled down, with primacy for internal security now firmly with the Garda Síochána. Virtually all G2’s ‘subversive’ files had been transferred to C3 at the Depot. In 1950 the Garda Síochána was 7,166 strong. By 1960 it had fallen to 6,514. Almost 60 stations had been closed, while 50 others were reduced to sub-stations where a single guard worked alone.5
Many of those who had formed the earliest generation of gardaí were still serving, now in their late 50s and 60s. The senior officer corps at Headquarters and throughout the divisions had few younger men. There had been some recruitment in the war years, principally through the ‘Taca Síochána’, a cohort of about 300 recruits, envisaged originally as a temporary support. A few Taca men had begun to move through the intermediate ranks as vacancies arose, usually through deaths.6
There was no recruitment from 1943 to 1952, when cautious recruitment got under way in order to make up for retirements. There was a plentiful pool of potential recruits in a country with few employment prospects. A total of 1,126 men applied in 1952, of whom just 174 were selected for training.
In 1959 the first 12 women – ban ghardaí – were attested, realising one of Costigan’s objectives. The Royal Ulster Constabulary had started recruiting women in 1946.
As he faced into his final year in office, Commissioner Costigan could also feel reasonably satisfied that discontent among the younger ranks of his force had been contained at least for the present.
In November 1961, younger gardaí had effectively bypassed the existing negotiating machinery provided through the Representative Bodies to protest against their exclusion from a pay rise awarded to more senior members.
A meeting planned for November 4th at the Macushla Ballroom on Amiens Street in Dublin, a well-known dancing venue, was proscribed by the Garda authorities. But hundreds of guards turned up nonetheless. A superintendent and a number of inspectors took the names of about 160 men who were served with disciplinary notices, charging them with discreditable conduct.7
In turn, a ‘go-slow’ was initiated in Dublin, with young gardaí declining to enforce traffic and street-trading regulations. The Minister for Justice, Charles Haughey, appeared to give ground, announcing that he would review the existing negotiation machinery and, if necessary, overhaul it. But on the same day, Costigan dismissed 11 supposed ringleaders from the force.
Ten days later, after an intervention by the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr John Charles McQuaid, the 11 men were reinstated and the crisis abated. By unhappy coincidence, the wife of Assistant Commissioner William P. Quinn, who headed the force’s ‘B’ (personnel) Branch, was killed in a traffic accident during the course of the dispute.
The Macushla ‘revolt’ was a watershed in relations between rank-and-file gardaí and their authorities. The largely docile Representative Bodies became strengthened in confidence and more assertive in their demands for improved pay and conditions. Garda John Marrinan (28), from Clare, one of the 11 dismissed by Costigan, was elected as General Secretary of the Representative Body for Guards (RBG). He set about putting its operations on a professional footing, learning from the modus operandi of the trade unions and following the example of the Police Federation of England and Wales. He was to serve as General Secretary until 1989.
But Commissioner Costigan was already beginning to show the strain of more than a decade in his post. Events, notably the Macushla revolt, were taking their toll as he moved into his 50s.
Costigan was by inclination a moderniser, a contrast, according to Garda historian Gregory Allen, to the conservative senior officers he commanded.8 He was a good decade younger than most of the men who formed his immediate staff at the Depot, and as such he did not share their institutional memory of the dangerous 1920s or the struggles with Blueshirts and IRA in the 1930s.
He sought to develop his force as much as budgetary constraints would permit, initiating a series of early organisational surveys using consultants Unwick Orr and Partners.
The Technical Bureau was expanded and provided with new equipment, including infrared scanners that could read the numbers filed off the frames of stolen bicycles; bicycle theft was a frequent occurrence in an otherwise essentially crime-free society. Police dogs were introduced in 1960 with the first canine ‘recruits’ coming from Britain. An Organisation and Methods office was established in 1956. Costigan insisted that the new female gardaí be seen on the streets in uniform and not merely assigned to office duties or other indoor work.
He established a Crime Prevention Unit for the Dublin Metropolitan Division. He was keen to expand the force’s radio communications system but the finance was not forthcoming to extend it much beyond the principal cities and some larger towns. One of his early initiatives had been to have the old-fashion...
